I’ve been checking out a new plug-in for Firefox this morning which is seriously impressing me. It’s called Ubiquity and you can find it here. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial

In essence, it allows you to open a small window in your browser window like this by pressing ctrl+space and type in a few words to perform a whole range of functions.

In this instance I typed flickr ubiquity mozilla – to search flickr for images tagged ubiquity and/or mozilla

So far I’ve been able to:

• get instant translations of selected text
• search websites like Flickr, wikipedia, youtube, googlemaps and more
• send emails
• perform calculations
• edit the text on webpages
• convert a webpage to a pdf file
• check email addresses in my contact list by typing a persons name
• highlight text on a page
• add maps to email (though not yet to this blog post)
• send a message to my twitter account
• get a word-count of text selected on a page (148 words up to this point)
• check the weather
• zoom in and out of the page
• add events/meetings to Google Calendar (typing add dinner 6pm tomorrow)

All by just pressing ctrl-space and entering a few logical words

I already feel like my computer use has changed forever.

I will say this, it’s not yet a perfect system – it’s only in alpha (a step or so before beta) and a few of the things that I’ve tried haven’t quite worked as they should. However a quick search of the message boards told me that this problem had been identified a couple of days ago and an update was posted which fixed the problem. Got to love community built software.

This video showcases some of it – it’s about 6 minutes.

Youtube video

Sketchup is an easy to use 3D modelling tool now owned by Google. I first tried it out a couple of years back and then, not having any reason to use it, put it away in a dark virtual cupboard.

I needed to create a model today though so I reached deep into the back of the cupboard and was able to whip this up in a couple of hours (in between meetings and reacquainting myself with elements of how it works).

There is also a nifty third party plugin with the imaginative name of Sketchup Web Exporter that enables you to display your models in a web browser – you can actually click and drag on this object to rotate it.